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Monday, 7 April 2014

Penguin no. 2028: Maigret at the Crossroads by Simenon

Cover design by Geoffrey Martin.

The Prefecture was deserted. A few comings and goings in the Vice Squad. A drug pedlar whom an inspector brought in about four o'clock in the morning and started questioning straight away.
The Seine donned a halo of milky mist which turned white, and it was daybreak, lighting up the empty embankments. Footsteps sounded in the corridors. Telephones ringing. Voices calling. Doors banging. The charwoman's brooms.
And Maigret, putting down his overheated pipe on the table, stood up and looked the prisoner over from head to foot, with an irritation not unmixed with admiration.

The short paragraphs are familiar, but I cannot recall having read another Maigret which begins quite this way, with a mass of short sentences, each capturing a single fleeting impression. I imagine the intention is to emphasise just how worn out Maigret is at this point of defeat, reached after a day and a night spent interrogating a witness who stood firm against the offensive. Carl Andersen maintained a quiet dignity throughout the process and never amended a single detail while being questioned for seventeen hours on recent events at the Three Widows Crossroads.

Andersen had found himself at the Prefecture on the Quai des Orfèvres because the body of Isaac Goldberg, a dealer in diamonds from Antwerp, had been found inside a car parked within his garage, with a bullet through the chest. The incriminating car was not the property of Andersen: it was his neighbour's prized new six-cylinder, while his worn out vehicle had in turn been moved to the neighbour's garage, and yet no one had heard a thing. But the sight of the dead man and the foreign car had been enough to panic Andersen into flight: the police had picked him up at the Gare D'Orsay after he fled by train towards Paris in the company of his sister.
And so there are many questions which remain unanswered at the conclusion of Andersen's interview. Why was Goldberg at the Three Widows crossroads, how had he made his way there, who had lured him and for what purpose, and why had the killer thought it necessary to switch the cars? At the end of the interrogation, a sleep-starved Maigret heads to the crossroads, twenty kilometres from Paris on the main road to Étampes, preparing to spend another day and night watching at the secluded location.

There are only three dwellings at the crossroads, including the ancient one in which the three old women had been found dead many years before, and which gives the intersection its name. This is Andersen's home, which he shares with his enigmatic sister Else - he had chosen it because of the reduced rent and the secluded location. His reluctance to mix with his neighbours means there is little community at the crossroads, but considerable tension and suspicion. His neighbour across the road is Monsieur Michonnet, the outraged owner of the transplanted car, who lives with a wife who maintains a constant vigil at her upstairs window. Forty yards away is the home of Monsieur Oscar, who runs a petrol station and workshop supplying the trucks which travel through the night delivering their produce in time for the morning markets of Paris.

This was written much earlier than the other Maigret stories I have read, which tend to portray a Maigret who is more sedate and more inclined to spend his time musing on his methods or reflecting on his childhood, with a glass of brandy in his hand, and to rely upon instinct and experience to infer motive from behaviour. But the Maigret presented here is anything but sedate - in the course of this short novel he chases the presumed murderer across a muddy field in the dark with a drawn revolver, he prevents a suspect from fleeing through a window by breaking through a bolted door, and he disables another gun-wielding suspect by jumping down several metres into a well, before raining blows upon his head.

And when he is not being active he is inscrutable, keeping to himself, declining the hospitality he is offered - even when it involves alcohol - and allowing no one to have any idea of his thoughts. There are even moments when he is perplexed by the case, knowing that an answer exists and must be observable, and yet finding himself unable to discern it.

The case he must solve is more complex than usual, and the resolution less expected; it made the final chapters particularly interesting to read.

La Nuit du carrefour first published 1931. This translation (by Robert Baldick) first published in Penguin Books 1963.

7 comments:

Fascinating. This novel has just been released in a new translation as part of Penguin's new complete Maigret series. The new version is called Night at the Crossroads, and, as I was reading it, I was struck by the short sentences and wondering if they also occurred in the earlier translation, which I'd read years ago and couldn't remember very well. And there they are, but different, in both versions. Either translation makes a good read – I'd say this was one of the better Maigrets.

Thanks Philip. I think The Night at the Crossroads must have been the original title - perhaps it was only in later years that Maigret's name came to feature in every title. I agree that this is one of the better Maigrets - I really enjoyed reading it, principally for the crime and the resolution, but also because it was fascinating to watch as Maigret responded in such an unexpected way.

Yes, the use of Maigret's name in the titles was a later thing, which the English translators took up and applied to the earlier books too. With the new versions, Penguin seems t be going back to fairly direct translations of the original titles.

I had a bad experience with Simenon. I read one of his psychological novels "La neige était sale". ( The snow is dirty). I truly could not find one aspect of the book to like. Perhaps I can find a Maigret book ( thanks for the Penguin list)...and give the author another chance.

I once read the first few pages of a Simenon book which was titled The Stain on the Snow in the Penguin edition - perhaps it is the same one. I know I didn't feel tempted to read on, although I will return to it one day. Even though some are better than others, I haven't felt that way about any of the Maigret books I have read, so I encourage you to give Simenon another go. I think this book, or Maigret in Court, would be good ones to try first.

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The Idea

This is a blog about my Penguin paperback collection which is restricted to the Penguins published before Allen Lane died in 1970. These books are identifiable by the pre-ISBN numbers on their spines, and are numbered approximately in publishing order. Many of these books are now forgotten, with any lingering interest focused primarily on their covers. I aim to rediscover them one at a time, by reading and commenting on one of these vintage Penguins each week - or at least that was the plan when I started the blog five years ago; these days the timing of the posts is a little more erratic.

My Penguin books are listed on the following pages. I have about 2000 of the approximately 3000 titles, and they look great in the book shelves en masse. But depressingly, the list shows how many I still have to find....